Why is this an “app”? This summer, the kids’ performing arts school are singing and dancing in a show at Disneyland. We’re all very excited, but my excitement, at least, was muted a little when I was told to install the “Travelbound” app in order to get access to the itinerary, travel arrangements, and accommodation details. Fuck that noise. This should have been a webpage. Why do you want me to install a(nother) shitty app just to tell me something that could have been a (smaller, faster, more…
Gareth's been in a mood all week. Turns out it started with a hosting bill. Not his own, mind. He doesn't have a website. Gareth thinks websites are for people who've run out of pub to shout in. But he heard about someone switching platforms, and it set him off on one of his tangents, the kind that starts with "you know what really gets me" and ends forty minutes later with him accusing a cookie banner of moral cowardice. Apparently someone had moved from a platform that wanted to squeeze money…
Man, I've been circling on this idea for some weeks now and couldn't quite figure out the best way to open, but I think this is a great one: About a month ago, Flathub announced a ban on slopcoded applications. Evangelos “GeopJr” Paterakis, developer of a number of popular Linux applications and ton of other things, did some research into just how many applications tagged with “AI slop”, a tag Flathub reviewers used to keep track of slopcoded applications submitted to Flathub, actually survived…
Previously I opined that Valve was about to win the console generation. I couldn't have possibly predicted that both Microsoft and Sony would just self-sabotage so hard that they're both going to lose. Between Microsoft's decimation of the Xbox division, slaughtering off the IdTech team, and continued increases of Xbox hardware prices; there's nothing to really be excited about with the Xbox. Sure their most recent presentation showed off a bunch of exclusives, but none of them really made me…
Yael Grauer on being told to "ask Claude" when seeking trusted advice:→ String Literal
A ghost bike is a memorial for a cyclist who has been killed in a motor vehicle accident. These bikes can be seen all over the world, painted white and located at, or near the site of the accident. As well as celebrating the life of the cyclist, ghost bikes are intended to raise public awareness of bikes on the road. A ghost bike memorial project was started in St. Louis, Missouri, in October 2003. After observing a motorist strike a bicyclist in a bike lane on Holly Hills Boulevard, Patrick…
I have just eaten a GIANT bowl of granola, fresh fruit, Greek yoghurt, and home grown honey (by one of our neighbours). I have zero regrets, but I may skip lunch today. 🤣 Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is ace, and so are you. ❤️ You can reply to this post by email, or leave a comment.
We're living in split realities. There's what modern software is actually capable of, and then there's the gargantuan pile of "AI" hype, fraud, and bullshit our biggest tech companies (and their lazy enablers in the tech press) have shoveled down the public's throat for the better part of the last five years. There's useful automation software that makes it easier to code, draft a new resume, or study vast repositories of scientific knowledge. And then there's a parade of technofascist…
The collection of signs for the 'Cornwall at War' museum makes me smile every time I pass them. It's on the way to a woods I take the dog to often. Every time I pass I say to myself "I'm going to stop and take a picture on the way home"– and then I don't. The next time I pass it, I remember I told myself I was going to take a picture last time, but this time I'll definitely remember. And then I don't again. Today I stopped and took a picture of them before I passed them. Haha! Beat you with…
The other day I was listening to this episode of Decoder Ring where they talk about how bad modern sculptures tend to be because we no longer have the educational pipeline and infrastructure to produce professional level sculptors. We do have sculptors. We have a chunk of famous artists who work in 3D space. If you listen to the podcast they talk about how hard it is to find artists who can still create the classical marble and bronze statues that one would expect to see in public spaces to…
For context, I have gotten a lot of emails either asking why I deactivated my account or just sending me well wishes after the deactivation. This post is more for them than anyone else. If you don't care about random techbro website drama, feel free to skip. I had been tired of the site for a while. When I joined lobste.rs it was pretty much hacker news but good: people were reasonable and found joy in crafting stuff with computer, instead of trying to make profit at all means possible which is…
For 94 minutes at least, all the countries in the world (except the US) were rooting for Belgium. And did they deliver. 4-1 to Belgium and US was knocked-out of the Round of 16. Even if Belgium were to lose to Spain in the quarter-finals, they are heroes for showing that even corruption can't overcome quality. I don't have anything against the USMNT itself, but when politicians try to influence sports, sportsmen inevitably become tarnished by politics.
I'm just so bored of talking about AI. It's like listening to vapers tell me how delicious their flavoured poison is. Did you ever meet someone at university who'd just tried drugs for the first time? Listening to a stoner ramble on about their mystic crystal revelations is amusing for the first five minutes, but quickly gets tiresome. Wow! You got your little computer friend to automate calling your mum? Great job, mate! Can we talk about something interesting now? Just as bad are the people…
A couple of weeks ago I decided to read John Green’s book, Everything is Tuberculosis, in part as research for the novel I am writing about a tuberculosis outbreak. Initially I considered buying it, but remembered the weak state of my finances and checked the Toronto Public Library system. A library 150 metres away had it available immediately. Yesterday was the due day, so I swung by to drop of the unfinished book. The librarian asked if I was done with it, and I explained that my effort to…
Pretty hard to write an intro for this post that consists of anything other than ‘Holy fucking shit this is hot’, so I won’t even try. Please welcome the phenomenal @jamiebear – who has contributed stunning guest blogs here before on being a proud sub, and the sexiness of smell – to share an outrageously […] The post Guest blog: Are you a dirty fucker? appeared first on Girl on the Net.
A piece of advice that is also a (somewhat sad) statement of fact https://filiph.net/text/to-make-money-be-useful-to-rich-people.html
I use AI every day; it’s unavoidable. But something has been grating on me for months, and it isn’t about development: non-technical people are using it to generate far too much slop. Not code slop, but business slop. Five paragraph meeting agendas. Four-page responses to a planning inquiry, because that way I get “all the facts”. A one-line question turns up dressed as a formal memo with a summary, three bullets of tangentially related sub-questions and a partridge in a pear tree. Documents…
Yesterday at work something very weird happened. During our lunch break, the conversation focused on me, at least for a couple minutes. My group sat next to another coworker, she’s older in age than most of my group, from another generation that would often work more than the others unprompted and at the same time complain that she’s doing too much and nobody else does anything. At least that’s what my coworkers say about her when she’s not present, but I don’t really see a reason to share the…
At the time one didn’t think of it, because of course one never does at the time, but looking back from the vantage point of 40+ years, “this “Total Eclipse of the Heart” was one of the most 80s songs with one of the most 80s videos that ever 80ed the 80s. Bonnie Tyler! Jim Steinman! Russell Mulcahy! (The last two being the songwriter and video director respectively, the latter who also directed Highlander, and the former who wrote every astoundingly bombastic pop song you can think of between…
What the fuck even is "Magical Insurance Bureaucrats" anyway? Compilation of a bunch of the art - this is my "tone piece" for the project more or less For a while now, I've been working on this thing called The Ongoing Adventures of Magical Insurance Bureaucrats in a World Recovering from a Failed Alien Invasion (a mouthful, but at least I'm true to myself) and when people ask me what it is, I don't really have a good answer. Wait what do you mean by that lmao This whole thing started as a…
Another emotive post from one of my favourite blogs. The practice is almost embarrassingly simple. When it gets dark, I do not press the lever. Instead I turn on one lamp. In my case it is a small floor lamp with a fabric shade that I bought for about four thousand yen, standing beside the chair where I read. It throws a warm pool of light over the chair, the small table beside it, and about a square meter of floor. The rest of the room — the kitchen counter, the far wall, the ceiling I cannot…
Sunscreen use is increasing, but skin cancer rates are also rising. Does that mean sunscreen doesn’t work, or – even worse – sunscreen might cause skin cancer? This was one of the common sunscreen myths I debunked in this video. Here’s one example, from @TonicHealth on TikTok: “Why is nobody talking about this? All these sunscreens are not doing the ... Read more Source
The Hyland Lake Ski Jump has such an ominous presence.
The recent end-of-financial-year sales were rather interesting – I found myself spending a lot more time browsing AliExpress than I did Amazon or eBay this year which is something I wouldn’t have envisioned in the past. I suppose the deals offered by the others just weren’t that good. While AliExpress was dangling cashbacks and coupons, I decided to make the most of it and buy some things that I needed. I felt like a USB 3.0 hub with a nice number of ports would be a good thing to aim for.…
I bought a book on my Kindle — a thing I have done many times before. I exchanged money for goods, as one is supposed to do in a capitalist society. Then this happened. “While you can continue reading books previously downloaded, you can no longer download Kindle books to this device. You can, of course, continue to read purchased books using Kindle for Web, iOS, Mac and PCs well as supported Kindle devices.” I wonder what response Jeff Bezos expects me to do. Does he think I will buy a new…
If you’ve read my blog before, you may know that I run a very small business with my husband. He makes horror-themed artwork 1 that we send pretty much everywhere, but the vast majority of our orders end up going to the US. We’ve loved having a global customer base, but as the years have gone by it’s become more challenging to send to so many different places. The tariffs imposed last year by the US were a huge source of worry and we genuinely believed we would have to suspend sales there.…
I have been getting back into blogging recently. I know I write this newsletter every 2 weeks, but I try and keep to a set number of topics as I know my audience is mostly developers. My blog gives me chance to write about whatever is on my mind, without worrying about it being relevant to my audience. When I first started "surfing the web" it was all about personal websites and going from one person's blog to another via links and blogrolls. I miss that style of the internet. You know, before…
An AI agent is its state. Strip away that state and you don’t have a lesser version of your agent; you have only the base model it was running on. This hyle of your weights is much different from the pneuma of your agent. Okay, from a functional programming / category theory perspective, saying “an agent is a monad” is a category error. Category theory monads are type constructors for computations that satisfy the monad laws that let you raise a value into a monadic computation and…
I’m obsessed with this “laptop” our 7 year old made: I asked him what the different features were. Check out these specs: Ghost button unleashes a ghost from the laptop Crossed-out ghosts buttons bring ghosts back in DO NOT PUSH button activates his laser hand (i.e. an empty cup from a local ice cream shop that turned into a laser hand during a playdate with his friends) Green drips are slime Brown thing is rope Colored buttons when pressed in different orders activate different powers He just…
I won’t beat around the bush. I’ve never thought of myself as a Software Developer who simply happens to play at being an Artist from time to time on the side. I’ve always seen myself as an Artist. The fact I happen to make my living as an engineer is a quirk of fate and necessity. Some would call it very lucky. And I suppose, for a while, I was indeed pretty lucky. I’ve spent the bulk of my career attempting to do relatively few “engineer” things while still making a living as a software…
